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[title]‘Half of me is trapped in the dreamworld and it means I can’t leave this house’ is pretty nuts as smalltalk over lunch from somebody you’ve just met goes. But lavish Lovecraft-inspired immersive theatre show The Key of Dreams makes no effort to hide the fact that weird things are afoot in Treowen, the isolated seventeenth century Welsh manor house in which it’s performed and set.
The brainchild of one Ivan Carić – who set up the company Lemon Difficult to produce it – the show is 24 hours long, typically running from noon on a Thursday or Saturday to noon the next day. While that includes four meals (during which the plot still runs) and around ten hours off overnight (during which the plot does not run), The Key of Dreams really does immerse you. For an entire day you’re part of its world, and you can’t help but throw yourself headlong into its many swirling plot lines because, frankly, you literally have nothing else to do here.
Not that it’s a show anyone is likely to randomly take a punt on. It’s £450 a ticket and you’ll need to spring a further £350 for a double or twin room unless you have alternative accommodation lined up. So £625 a head, plus travel, plus booze, basically.
We can return to the question of value for money later, but the point is that nobody is doing this thing casually. Some of my fellow guests were very, very uncasual and had either come from overseas or were back for a second visit: a sizable proportion of the twenty-ish strong group was made of Americans, returnees and at least one returnee American.
What do you do in The Key of Dreams?
Initially cast as investigators from Miskatonic University (HP Lovecraft’s fictional New England seat of arcane knowledge), we have been sent to Treowen to try to work out what the hell is going on here. This involves speaking to its five core inhabitants in an effort to get to the bottom of a mystery that – without saying too much – involves a centuries old witch and a malevolent tree. On top of that there are four subsidiary plotlines that revolve around past inhabitants of the house, and on top of that there are smaller story puzzles scattered on more or less every inch of free space throughout the house. Plus we eat a lot and there’s a bar – selling themed cocktails – that’s open the entirety of the first day.
When I say you can’t do The Key of Dreams casually, I mean you have to be committed. You don’t need any real knowledge of Lovecraft, and the story(s) are original. The current iteration of the show is called Shadows Lengthen, which follows its original incarnation Unexpected Growth. So the version I did was effectively a sequel to a show I never saw, but all that backstory only deepens the sense of a full fleshed out world. The joy of the prodigious length is that we’re given plenty of time to catch up.
Some people want to visit Paris; some people want to save a group of lost souls from an evil tree.
‘Was it scary?’ is something several people asked me afterwards and the answer is basically ‘not in a personal sense, no’. We’re cast as outsiders who are basically going to be fine, and in any case I don’t think inducing a state of 24-hour terror in your audience would be either advisable or achievable. But we do come to care about the fates of the characters: some ten hours in I was determined to do anything in my power to save the immortal soul of Emily Carding’s terminally emo Dee (about as close as the show comes to having a ‘good’ character), while at the same time allowing Heather Rose Andrews’s pale and interesting goth girl Lavina – who had recently come back from the dead after 20 years – to ill-advisedly summon an evil spirit because I probably had a crush on her by this stage.
As I understand it there’s not really a script, and while there are plot points to stick to and marks to hit, what the actors are doing is akin to extreme method acting: staying in character for basically an entire day. It’s definitely two tiered: several of the show’s creatives potter around in the guise of less important denizens of the house, and definitely aren’t acting to nearly the same extent as the leads. But the core cast are largely terrific: Rik Sowden is so convincing as house owner Wyn that I felt very unclear on whether he was part of the show or not at first; Carding’s performance as the pathologically miserable Dee is so committed Daniel Day Lewis would probably think it ‘a bit much’ – to all intents and purposes, I felt Dee existed.
Is it good? Is it £450 good?
It’s very enjoyable. Overwhelming at first, and then you get a handle on it and choose your own adventure, accepting the fact that it’s simply impossible for one person - or small group - to do everything. It’s sociable too: by the end it truly felt like I knew everybody else in the house. It perhaps misses a bit of Punchdrunk-level tech splashiness at moments, but sheer investment in the story makes up for it.
The food is decent quality gastropub level stuff – solid and modestly inventive, but you wouldn’t call it ‘a foodie destination’. The rooms are relatively spartan but attractive and it’s kind of a plus they’re largely without modern amenities (the show acknowledges the real date but is effectively set in the early twentieth century in terms of technology, cultural references, etc). There is intentionally not a lot else to do beyond participate, though the bar area is well stocked with puzzles – which generally yield up some tidbit related to the plot when solved – if you want to take a more chilled out approach.
Is it ‘worth it’? Considering the relatively low number of audience members, and relatively high number of performers and staff, I think the prices are reasonable. But of course they are high: a trip to The Key of Dreams is easily as much as a modest European minibreak. But it’s hardly an insubstantial experience. Some people want to visit Paris for a couple of days; some people want to save a group of lost souls from the clutches of an evil tree. (I think some of the American guests were going to do both). The bottom line is that if The Key of Dreams sounds potentially up your street, then you’ll probably enjoy it – it’s well executed, involving and beautifully detailed, and while it doesn’t literally recreate the horror of being a protagonist in a Lovecraft story, it’s probably no bad thing that you’re not actually going to get squished by a shoggoth.
The Key of Dreams is at Treowen, Monmouthshire. Go here for tickets and performance schedule.
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